Freelance Resources

Resources for Starting and Maintaining Your Own Court Reporting Business

These are resources that might be used most often by freelance court reporters. For those who are already aware of these resources, please take the time to look into them and make sure you have the most current information.

General Small Business Resources

• AllBusiness.com
• BizOffice
• Entrepreneur.com
• Inc.com
• National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE)

Government Resources

• Business.gov
• IRS Small Business and Self-Employed One-Stop Resource
• ReadyBusiness
• Small Business Administration
  • SBA Outside Resources & Great Business Hotlinks

Captioning Resources

• Caption Central
  This site offers captioning reference materials, news, and commentary.
• FCC Captioning Information
• NCRA Online Forums
• NCRA Professional Services Locator
• Captioning Web
  This site offers various resources including links to offline and online captioning companies, encoder manufacturers, deaf and hard-of-hearing information, captioning resources and articles, as well as laws relating to captioning services. In addition, there are job listings for online as well as offline captioning jobs.
• Yahoo! Captioners Community

Write a Business Plan

A business plan will help you determine what your goal is in opening a new business, it describes your product or service and also discusses your competition, to name a few. This is an absolute must before attempting to take the next step in opening your business as it helps you solidify your purpose is and what your goals are.

Here are examples of business plans:

BPlans.com
http://www.bplans.com/dp/

Entrepreneur.com

Score.org/template_gallery

Small Business Administration Business Planning
http://www.sba.gov/starting_business/planning/writingplan.html

Write a Marketing Plan

Once you have defined your goals for your business, you need to write a marketing plan that describes how you intend to let potential clients know about your products and services. A typical marketing plan has descriptions on an analysis of the competitive market and offers budget analysis for a marketing plan.

Here are examples of marketing plans:

BPlans.com Marketing Plan examples
http://www.bplans.com/spv/3319/index.cfm?affiliate=pas

Small Business Administration Marketing Plan Tips
http://www.sba.gov/starting_business/marketing/basics.html

The Write Market - Marketing Plan Outlines
http://www.thewritemarket.com/marketing-plan.shtml

Educate Yourself on Legal Aspects

Look up local tax laws, employment laws, human resources information, and hiring procedures.

Here is information on tax laws and financing your business:

IRS Business Information
http://www.irs.gov/businesses/

Turbo Tax - Tips
http://www.turbotax.com/tax_tips_and_resources/business_taxes_and_software.html

Small Business Association Financing tips
http://www.sba.gov/financing/index.html

Bank of America Small Business Resource Center
http://www.bankofamerica.com/smallbusiness/resourcecenter/index.cfm?template=overview

Hiring and Human Resources

HR Tools.com
http://www.hrtools.com/Frames.asp

SHRM - Society for Human Resource Management
http://www.shrm.org/